Guest Post: 43 Government Reps Walked Into a Summit…. What Next?

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Maggie Murphy, Senior Global Advocacy Manager for Transparency International, contributes the following guest post:

International summits come and go, and all too often the promises made at these summits are quickly forgotten, lost in an online catacomb or otherwise hard to track. We at Transparency International are determined that the commitments made by government representatives at last May’s London Anticorruption Summit (648 total commitments by 41 of the 43 participating governments) must not slide into oblivion in this way. That’s why, as Matthew announced in a post earlier this month, we’ve gone through every single country statement and compiled all commitments into one central database, sortable by country, theme, and region. Our goal is for this database to be used by anticorruption advocates and activists to monitor what their countries have committed to, and whether and where they are making progress.

We’ve done our own preliminary analysis of the commitments, assessing the extent to which each commitment is (1) “concrete” (i.e measurable), (2) “new” (i.e., generated by the Summit), and (3) “ambitious” (according to country partners). We found that more than half of the commitments were concrete, about a third were brand new, and about a third seen to be ambitious by our country partners. That’s encouraging, and certainly better than I would have expected.

We’ve put together a more formal analysis here, including a description of how we came to our conclusions. Let me highlight some of the most interesting ones: Continue reading →

Guest Post: Is Sunlight Really the Best Disinfectant? Evidence on Procurement Transparency from Europe

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Mihály Fazekas, of the University of Cambridge and the Government Transparency Institute, who contributes the following guest post:

Public procurement, which accounts for roughly one-third of government spending in OECD countries and up to 50% in developing economies, is well-known as an area associated with high corruption risk. Hence, it is hardly a surprise that a range of policy recommendations from international organizations (such as the OECD), civil society networks (such as the Open Contracting Data Standard), and research projects (e.g. Digiwhist) have emerged to promote anticorruption in public procurement. And one of the most popular prescriptions for achieving this goal is increased transparency. Transparency, of course, can mean different things. For purposes of the discussion here, we will follow the OECD and World Bank in defining “public procurement transparency” as entailing the timely, free, and accurate publication of public procurement documents in a central e-procurement portal in a machine-readable format, with this publication requirement applying to every major step of the contracting process, and disclosing all key characteristics of the tender and contract. (For a comprehensive data template see here).

Research suggests that this sort of transparency does make a difference in terms of bidder numbers and composition. Yet it remains an open question whether public procurement transparency is necessary or sufficient for controlling corruption in public procurement. Indeed, if one looks at a sample of European countries’ public procurement transparency and their suspected corruption risks, one finds a surprising result: the best governed countries in Europe have the lowest levels of transparency in public procurement. Continue reading →

Anticorruption Investigators and Prosecutors: Bookmark this Web Site!

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The International Anticorruption Resource Center, a Washington-based group of American investigators and former prosecutors, has developed a first-class web site on how to investigate and prosecute corruption crimes that everyone in the business of investigating or prosecuting corruption crimes should bookmark.  Divided into three main sections – Detection, Proof, and Evidence – the site guides the reader through the entire process of developing and presenting a corruption case: from the first interview with a whistleblower through assembling the facts to proving them in a court of law.  While there are any number of Web sites with material useful for investigators and prosecutors (here and here for examples), this is the only I have found that pulls together in one place the basics that every anticorruption investigator or prosecutor needs.

Although clearly aimed at those in the early stages of their career, I recommend that even the most harden veterans peruse the site.  They will find it a valuable refresher and may well find some helpful tips.  Two pages I particularly liked were – Continue reading →

Against Alarmism: Frank Vogl’s Misguided Critique of the DOJ’s Decision Not To Re-Try Bob McDonnell

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Earlier this month, the ongoing saga of the bribery charges against former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell came to an end—not with a bang but a whimper—when the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it would not seek a re-trial in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to vacate McDonnell’s original conviction. Given that we’ve already had plenty of discussion of the McDonnell case on GAB (including commentary on the Supreme Court’s decision here and here), I wasn’t planning to say more about this.

But then I read Frank Vogl’s blog post on The Globalist. Mr. Vogl’s view is that the DOJ’s decision shows that, with respect to corruption, it’s now the case that “[a]nything goes in America, third-world style” and that “[t]he United States, once an admirable leader on combatting political corruption, has now fallen into line with the lax standards of business-political relationships that pervade many other countries.” (He later refers to the U.S. “a stinking city on the Hill.”) Mr. Vogl also declares that the “core message” of the DOJ’s decision not to re-try McDonnell is that the DOJ has “accepted an increasingly narrow definition of corruption,” and he further insinuates that Hillary Clinton and the mainstream Democratic Party (as well as the Republican Party) are “content to accept money in politics in all its forms.”

This is histrionic nonsense. The core arguments are so obviously flawed that at first I didn’t think it was worth writing a rebuttal. But Mr. Vogl is an influential voice in the world of anticorruption advocacy, given that he’s one of the 852 co-founders of Transparency International. (OK, OK, that’s an exaggeration. But if I had a quarter for every person I’ve heard claim to have been one of the founders of TI, I’d be able to buy myself a Grande Frappuccino at my local Starbucks, maybe even a Venti.) So I thought it would be worthwhile to explain why I had such a negative reaction to his piece. Here goes: Continue reading →

TI’s Database of London Anticorruption Summit Commitments

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Last May’s London Anticorruption Summit seems a long time ago now, given everything that’s happened in the intervening months (especially Brexit and the resulting downfall of David Cameron, who convened the Summit in the first place). But many in the anticorruption community are still hopeful that the London summit, and perhaps future events like it, can help spur more serious international progress on the fight against corruption. As regular GAB readers might recall, shortly after the summit I went through each of the individual country statements to try to figure out what sorts of promises or announcements each of the summit participants had made with respect to several issue areas–those blog posts are here and here.

As I acknowledged in the posts, my efforts were quick & dirty & preliminary. I’m happy to report that Transparency International undertook a much more thorough and systematic effort to go through each of the country statements, identify each separate commitment in each statement, and give each one a 1-3 score on each of three dimensions: (1) whether the commitment is new; (2) whether the commitment is ambitious; and (3) whether the commitment is concrete. TI’s analysis also categorizes the country commitments into 20 different categories: anticorruption environment; anti-money laundering; asset recovery; beneficial ownership; bribery; defense & security; denial of entry; innovation; international anticorruption architecture; law enforcement; natural resources; OECD; open data; private sector; public procurement; public sector integrity; sports; tax; training & assistance; whistleblower/civil society space protection. (Several of the categories are further subdivided into “focus themes.”) The database also includes the full text of each commitment.

I may do a more substantive follow-up post later on, with my reactions to TI’s report and/or my take on the information contained in the database, but for now I just wanted to say kudos to TI for doing this, and to alert those GAB readers who weren’t already aware of this that they can check out the report and the database here.

Anticorruption Bibliography–September 2016 Update

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An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare: Time to Act Agressively, Quickly on Corruption

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Below is the full text of remarks Solomon Islands Prime Mininster Manasseh Sogavare delivered September 8, 2016,  at a workshop in Honiara, Solomon Islands, to develop a national anticorruption strategy for the country 

Hon Premiers and your delegations, Members of the Steering Committee of the National Anti-Corruption Strategy, Representatives of the diplomatic corps and international organisations, senior officials from our integrity institutions and various institutions of our Government, representatives of our business community from the private sector, representatives from our civil society based organisations, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning to you all.

Let me say at the outset how pleased I am to see many of you attending this national workshop which undoubtedly, you would now know, is a precursor-event to the development and formulation of our country’s first ever National Anti-Corruption Strategy.

I had wanted to address you and the public on the subject matter of “our fight against corruption”, and I am pleased that this opportunity has come up. Like many of you, I am personally convinced that the fight against corruption is not just a fight by Government alone, it is a fight by all stakeholders. It is a fight that must be pursued by all of us collectively. Continue reading →

Larger Governments Have Less Corruption (Part 2 – Possible Explanations)

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In my last post, I argued that the familiar hypothesis—advanced by Gary Becker and others—that big governments are associated with more corruption is inconsistent with the available cross-country empirical evidence. In fact, though the results of different studies are not entirely consistent, the weight of the evidence seems to suggest that (controlling for other possible correlates), countries that have larger governments—defined primarily as those that have higher levels of government spending as a percentage of GDP—have lower levels of perceived corruption, as measured by the familiar indexes, such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). Again, there are some questions about the robustness of this negative correlation—some studies find that it is statistically significant, while others do not—but there’s enough supporting evidence that I think it’s fair to (tentatively) treat this correlation as genuine.

Perhaps in hindsight this shouldn’t be so surprising. Putting aside multiple regression and other fancy statistical techniques, if one just eyeballs the CPI “league table,” it’s clear that the group of countries that consistently score near the top of the rankings include lots of countries—particularly countries in Northern and Western Europe—with quite large governments (such as Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, and Iceland), while the bottom of the CPI list includes countries with very small governments. (Even if one excludes barely functioning states, like Somalia, the bottom group in the CPI includes small-government states like Bangladesh, Cambodia, Haiti, Russia, and the Central African Republic). Of course, this by itself doesn’t tell us much, especially given the well-established correlation between GDP and the government spending/GDP ratio—but, again, multiple regression techniques that control for GDP and other factors show that the positive correlation is genuine, and the handful of favorite examples often trotted out to suggest that small governments are the key to lower corruption (like Singapore and Hong Kong) are in fact statistical outliers.

So let’s assume that, as most studies seem to show, there’s a negative correlation between the government spending/GDP ratio and perceived corruption. What’s the explanation for this?

The short answer is that I don’t know, and I’m not aware of any research that really nails this down. But here are a few possibilities, some cribbed from existing papers, others based on my own wild speculations: Continue reading →

Watching Out: Cambodian Corruption Video Documentation Where Censorship Fails

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Low-cost video, and easier video distribution, simple though it sounds, is emerging as one of the premier corruption-fighting tools. This is especially true for small countries with poor track records in public integrity. Consider Cambodia. Although Prime Minister Hun Sen’s 30-year rule has been rife with graft, cronyism, land grabbing, and political violence, the government has been able to keep the extent of this hidden from most of the Cambodian public. Yet video and video-sharing services have proved one form of protest that the reigning government cannot seem to quash.

The most recent video to provoke the ire of the ruling party has low production values and little action. Three men sit at a table, one talking for the majority of the eight-minute run time about a Global Witness report’s allegations of extreme nepotism and cronyism within the ruling family. The man speaking, Kem Ley, was an opposition politician who was assassinated in broad daylight at a gas station convenience store just two days after his remarks. Many commentators immediately suspected the killing was political; these statements themselves spurred lawsuits from the ruling party. Multiple YouTube versions of the video now have several hundred thousand views each, with video news stories covering the killing tallying hundreds of thousands more. Kem’s funeral procession brought out droves of Cambodians, some reports numbering the crowd at two million (in a country of around 15 million people).

Another recent video about an anticorruption campaigner has become extremely popular despite—or perhaps because of—the government’s best efforts to stop it. The video’s subject, Chut Wutty, worked to expose illegal logging in Cambodian forests, logging that often happened with police complicity or direct participation. While accompanying journalists to show them the extent of the illegal deforestation, Wutty was shot and killed by a police officer. The low-budget documentary about his life and death was released this spring. Banned by the government, the film also quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views and gathered plenty of attention.

In a country with state-controlled media, sparse internet connectivity, and extreme poverty, the exposure to corruption-exposing video is ad hoc but growing. Videos like these hold promise for the future of the long-struggling country for several reasons:

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Catalyzing Anticorruption Efforts in the Pharmaceutical Sector–Collaboration Is Key

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Michael Petkov, Programme Officer for Transparency International’s Pharmaceuticals & Healthcare Programme, contributes the following guest post:

It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that the pharmaceutical sector has extensive corruption risks: the sector is extremely complex, with multiple actors, high-value products, large-volume contracts, and a high degree of information asymmetry. But despite these well-known risk factors many actors in the pharma sector are failing to produce and enforce adequate anticorruption policies. Key decision-makers in the pharma sector frequently do not perceive corruption as an important issue and often do not display a genuine commitment to anticorruption efforts.

A recent paper published by Transparency International and the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto identifies several overarching challenges that are hampering efforts to minimize corruption in the pharma sector, and posits key areas for action including the importance of harnessing technology to minimize corruption vulnerabilities and of increasing the monitoring, enforcement, and sanctions of actors. Because of the complexity of the sector, collaboration is essential to making progress on all of these fronts. After all, a key difficulty for tackling corruption in the pharmaceutical sector is the fact that the medicine chain stretches across national borders. It is encouraging that governments came together at the London Anti-Corruption Summit and recognized the need for national institutions to share relevant information with their peers in other countries. Similarly, multi-stakeholder initiatives such as the European Healthcare Fraud and Corruption Network are excellent opportunities for all types of actors to come together, share information, and collaborate with others to take action.

There are two other ways in which greater collaboration is critical for making progress on the fight against corruption in the pharma sector: Continue reading →